Jega: Geometry

There’s a common link among most all pieces of electronic music. Maybe it goes for most instrumental music for that matter. It’s the ability for the music to sink into the background while your mind wanders off on grand tangents. While listening to Geometry, you start to think about the vast, synthetic cyberscape rushing beneath you while you float overhead.

The songs on Jega’s (Dylan Nathan’s) Geometry evoke cavernous voids and in contrast, tightly compacted rhythms, filled with hollow beats. Standard electronica pulses compete with those fading in and out, making a clatter with their irregularity. But these random sounds become a lot less random when you zoom out and look at the bigger picture. The cacophonous beats clank back and forth between the left and right channels, playing ping pong with your brain.

Nathan creates eerie, two-dimensional spaces, replications of those existing somewhere inside the last level of a video game or the inner workings of a computer. The beats are manipulated and twisted then multiplied and pressed on top of each other. Synthetic string backing gives dimension, but also adds to the ominous and spooky atmosphere. The feel becomes a bit lonely in “Binary Space” with sparse electronic moans surrounded by nothing but empty space.

“Inertia” starts off a delicate electronic melody that excels into something twice as loud and layered. Examining similar song titles like “Syntax Tree” and “Post Mid Arc,” noticeably all derived from mathematics and computer science, you get a better picture of what exactly Jega is putting together here.

Geometry sounds less precise and more like machines worn with use, the flaws not being intended by the creator of the machine, but unavoidable. Ultimately, the songs are very stable and not disposable.